The Sound of Eras Ending

Eras are marked by a dominant medium, by myths and values which are assumed to be true, by a Thesis which tells you how things work and an AntiThesis which leans against those assumptions and attempts to moderate it.

The current era is ending, and there is no better evidence than the recent work of David Broder.

Broder is one of the giants of our current era. A Korean War veteran, Broder rose within the Washington establishment. He saw Watergate and, more important, he saw what came after it. He saw that the bad guys, in the end, won. As an "impartial" observer of "the truth," which is political reality, he gradually internalized those lessons and, in so doing, literally ran off the rails in our time, becoming a parody of himself.

This has happened before. In fact, it happens each time an existing
political Thesis falls, and a new one struggles to take its place. It
happened to H.L. Mencken,
whose snide Germanic attacks on the "boo-boisie" were considered cold
and faintly neo-Nazi by readers in the 1930s. It happened to Westbrook Pegler, but it also happened to his opposite number on the left, Drew Pearson.
Pegler could not comprehend the New Right, which adopted the cloth of
populism for corporatist ends. Pearson could not comprehend the New
Left, with its hatred of the New Deal order.

One reason for the failure of Pearson and Pegler in their time, and for
Broder in his, is that they fail to accept that the media they are
most comfortable with is being replaced. Pearson and Pegler could not
adapt to TV — they were radio folk who also wrote for newspapers.
Broder is a TV person who also writes for newspapers. He can’t
comprehend the Internet, with its two-way intimacy, with readers who
all think they can write, and frequently do. It completely disorients
him, and he has a knee-jerk reaction to it. He sees this medium as barbarians at the gate, and I guess from the view of his castle we are. But there you go.

Those steeped in the new media environment, like Josh Marshall (right), say they are amused by
Broder’s decline. Personally I’m both saddened and heartened. Saddened,
because I had respected Broder for most of my life as an objective
journalist. Heartened, because his failure to comprehend anything of
his time, the fact that his time is past, means this time is finally
ending, that a new era is out there waiting to be born.

It can’t come fast enough.